


Strange Fruit

by justalittlegreen



Series: Sunshine and Filth [12]
Category: MASH
Genre: 1950s, Angst, Betrayal, F/M, Homophobia, Hurt, It Gets Better, Letters, M/M, MOAR ANGST, Pain, anguish, plausibility, the roots of OT3, you know it gets better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 10:23:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16574663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justalittlegreen/pseuds/justalittlegreen
Summary: Jumping back again. This time, to Peggy reading Hawkeye's letter.





	Strange Fruit

Peggy waits until Erin is asleep before she lets herself open the letter from the famous Hawkeye Pierce. She smiles at it all day as she passes the pile of mail on the hall table. She knows it won't be bad - the Army would certainly tell her first, right? She knows Hawkeye doesn't have a wife or much of a family at home; maybe he just needs someone to regale with tales. Or maybe to tell her things BJ's embarrassed about, stories that won't show him in the most flattering light. Her husband has to be the butt of the joke at least once in awhile, right?

She saves the letter for last, after neatly stacking the bills and notices on the kitchen table. BJ has always managed the household money - he likes the precision of it, and she's more than happy to let him have the chore - and she imagines him sitting at the table with her, pencil over his ear and checkbook out, tilting his head the way he does when he's thinking. There's a letter from him, too.

BJ's latest is about the bug-out, full of descriptions of how quickly their camp can come apart at the seams, how they tackle the place like vultures until there's nothing left but the standing bones of the tents. He explains that Hawkeye stayed behind to take care of a patient, and she can feel the awe in his words. She offers a quick, selfish thank-you to whatever god kept BJ from doing something like that. There's no space for heroics when a man has a wife and baby at home. Not stupid heroics, anyway. 

He finishes the tale by describing what it was like to come back to the camp, after the front got pushed back, how they rolled in "like a cross between a funeral procession and a parade" and how they found Hawkeye, a nurse, and the company clerk hiding futilely among what was left. The relief in the letter is palpable. "You don't know how grateful you are for your Swamp until they roll up its walls, cart it away, and you think you'll never see it again," he explains. "But if I'm being honest, my love, it's not the canvas and the stove that make that place a little bit of a home."

She finishes the letter with a smile, and takes a good long sniff of the paper. This is as close as she'll get to his hands before the war is over. Or before - Peg can't bring herself to think of what might bring BJ home before the war is over. 

She folds the letter and slips it carefully back into its envelope - she'll tuck it into the box with the others later - and tugs Hawkeye's letter out. It's just a page long, in tiny, cramped writing. Writing so small she has to peer at it, turn on another light. She contemplates getting BJ's magnifying glass from his desk.  

One thing is for certain: this letter was written in a place where prying eyes were a given, and privacy was what the writer needed most.

 

_My name is Benjamin Franklin Pierce. You might know me as Hawkeye, from BJ’s letters. Our home here is a stinking pile of filth with all the luck of a single shiny penny. Your husband, of course, is the only one with any cents._

Peggy chuckles. She can't resist a good pun. 

_I’ve been in Korea for a year and a half, sewing up the wounded and sending them back for more, and failing to save more lives than I will ever be able to live with. I was a lighthearted man with a dark streak when I came here. Now, I am a dark man who basks in whatever glimmer of humanity can be resuscitated from this ugly stinking corpse of a ~~war~~  police action. Mostly in the form of mouth-to-mouth._

She's amazed he got past the censors. Maybe the censors couldn't be bothered to make out the chicken scratch. She knows from BJ's letters that he's against the war, but the language resonates and grates at the same time. BJ never complains like this. He knows his duty. Her heart aches at the line about not being able to live with himself, though. She knows that well enough from BJ's own inner torment. He's never been able to handle the losses well.

_I assume he’s told you about the pranks. Maybe he’s told you about the women – just mine, never his. I promise you that. I assume he’s told you about the marathons of surgery, about the ways the two of us can practically waltz through a patient, so familiar and attuned are we to each other’s moves and thoughts. I have never met a surgeon like him._

_The truth is, Mrs. Hunnicutt, I’ve never met another person like him._

Peg beams. She knew BJ adored Hawkeye, and had hoped it was mutual - that he wasn't a fair-weather friend. You don't need those in a war zone. But Hawkeye seems to be all-in, as much as BJ is with him.

_I want you to know that BJ’s love for you and Erin is what keeps him alive and shining. That I can tell when he’s thinking of you, because there’s a smile that only appears when he’s writing to you or thinking about you. When he wears that look, he escapes this place for just a second, and I envy that as much as I am grateful that he can._

Peg closes her eyes for a second. She knows that smile. She's touched that Hawkeye sees it, and sees the loneliness in him that BJ's talked about. All those jokes and all those friends and no one there for dinner when he comes home. 

_But I’m doing a partnerless waltz around the thing I’m trying to say, which is to say, I have now spent five paragraphs (and countless other burned letters) trying not to hurt you. But if you are anything like BJ – if you are the woman to whom he is so completely, madly, and utterly devoted – then there is half a chance you’ll understand._

Understand what?

_Peggy, I love him._

 

He what?

 

_And he loves me._

 

No. He. Doesn't. The thought comes like a bullet, shot from the hip without thinking. No, he doesn't. No. He's mistaken. Her husband admires him. He appreciates his skill. He needs his company, and yes, he likes him. But he's wrong, that Hawkeye Pierce. Nobody loves Peg the way he loves Peg. Nobody loves him the way she does. And definitely - definitely - not the company of whatever strange fruit he finds in a foreign country under who knows what kind of stress. 

No.

_And that fact is driving him out of his mind with fear._

Peggy realizes she's stopped breathing.

_I have never meant or wanted to take him from you._

The hell he is.

 _To take him from the people who make him whole. To pull him away from the sunshine. And if there is one thing I beg you to believe it’s this: he has not left you, in mind, heart, or soul. Nor in body, I believe, as you’ll find out when your good man arrives home._  
  
She doesn't know what Hawkeye Pierce looks like, not from the front, but the image of BJ with his arms around a dark-and-silver-haired man fills her vision and makes her dizzy. She pushes the chair away from the table, forces herself to the sink and splashes cold water on her face, taking big gulping breaths until the urge to vomit passes.   
  
_Peggy, I love him. And he loves me._

She hates him. 

_He loves me._

_He loves me._

_He loves me._

The pain is so visceral, Peg wonders if she's been stabbed.

She'd imagined - there were whispers, from other women, of things that happen in war. She'd been ready for - well, women. BJ is always so kind to the nurses he works with, she guessed it could happen. In a life-and-death situation, she knows, on some level, she wouldn't want him to be alone if something happened to him. The BJ who never went to war would never, but war does things to people.

Maybe the war did this to him. Maybe he's so out of his mind that he can't - he doesn't know who he is anymore.

Peg staggers back to the table and picks up the letter like it might start firing bullets.

_If you leave him over this, I’ll never forgive myself. If you wish me a slow and painful death on the spot, I’ll understand. You and I will likely never meet, but I wanted a chance that you would forgive him now. Because he loves so – openly. So unashamedly. Because he has not left you._

~~~~Sure. Because BJ in the arms of another man isn't a betrayal at all.

_~~Because he will never be mine, even if I’m his.~~ Because he’s still coming home to you._

 

And how could she let him in? Coming home to her, yes, but coming home  _who?_

 

_I am at your mercy, Peggy Hunnicutt. If there is some small place in your heart that can understand how I fell in love with the man who calls you home, it would be the greatest act of grace anyone has ever bestowed upon me._

_With gratitude,_

_Hawkeye_

 

Peg reads the letter four more times until the tears come, hot and angry. Then she takes BJ's latest letter and hauls herself upstairs, dumping out everything he's written to her in the last six months and reading through them in order, scouring for mentions of Hawkeye. There they are, hardly subtle now, in light of this. The way his sentences linger Hawkeye's laugh. Hawkeye's brilliant prankster mind. The way Hawkeye makes him a better surgeon. How grateful he is for Hawkeye's company.

She reads and reads and reads, imagining BJ's face - the faces he makes at her, the ways he looks at her, the sound of his breath catching when she unbottons his pants, the way he cups the back of her head when they kiss - it all gets swirled into images of a dark-haired stranger with long-fingered hands and blue eyes. That man who elicits the same growl. 

Do they kiss?

Do they - she shudders, can't even think of it as making love, not the way she and BJ do, not the way he looks at her with such naked want, invites her into the place he's most tender and vulnerable. 

How _dare_ he. How dare he let someone else.

 

Peggy stuffs all the letters back into the box and opens their closet door. She pulls out a sweater BJ rarely wears, but smells enough like him. She presses it to her face and sobs and sobs - for the loss of them, of him, of all the secret paths within him that only she could walk.

 

 

**

 

The next morning, she wakes up with what her Ma would call a "cryin' hangover." Her face is puffy and her head aches fiercely. For a moment, she doesn't remember why she's clutching the old sweater, and feels the softer ache of missing BJ that appears almost every morning. For a moment, before it hits her, she imagines him yawning and stretching next to her, kissing her head and mumbling a good morning. 

And then the memory of Hawkeye Pierce's letter curdles all the warmth in her belly and rots it.

Peg gets out of bed, shaking.

She gets through a shower, dresses in a stiff and starched shirtwaist dress. Makes the coffee stronger than usual. Bounces Erin on her hip and settles her in the high chair, like she does every morning while she writes to him. The pad and pen are waiting for her on the table.

She doesn't know what to do.

She can't leave him. 

She doesn't want to leave him.

What if he's left her?

She leaves the table, and checks the postmarks on Hawkeye's letter and on BJ's. BJ's is later. He wrote this after he and Hawkeye did - whatever they did. Whatever they've started. For whatever reason, BJ is either keeping up the pretense, or maybe Hawkeye's right - he does love her. Maybe this is just a way of dealing with the horrors of the war and he's not lying about how badly he wants to come home.

It's not enough to quiet the pounding in her ears, but it is enough to get the pen in her hand.

_Dear BJ,_

_Erin wants you to know that oatmeal is her new favorite food. She's currently professing her love for it by indulging in as fully as possible - mouth, ears, hair, and definitely shirt._

Maybe it's just a mistake. Battle stress. Maybe he just needs to remember what's here for him.

_She's also taken to doing the most adorable thing. When she's tired, but doesn't want to nap, she'll stick her head under the couch and pretend I can't find her. More than once I've simply let her do it, only to have her fall completely asleep within minutes. I've gotten a lot more scrupulous about vacuuming this week._

_I'm wearing the yellow dress with the buttons down the back today. The one I always need your help undoing._

_If you were here right now, I'd invite your assistance._

_Love,_

_Peg_

She runs the kitchen sponge over the envelope. Her tongue is too dry to seal it.


End file.
